Cuban-American Vote Explains Everything

If you want to understand why President Obama was re-elected despite a largely unsuccessful presidency and almost unprecedentedly high and continuous unemployment, just look at the Cuban-American vote.

In fact, if you want to understand America today — specifically, why it is in decline — just look at the Cuban-American vote.

As reported in the Wall Street Journal, “The president captured 48 percent of the Cuban-American vote in Florida — a record high for a Democrat.”

Democratic presidential nominees went from 25 percent of the Cuban-American vote in 2000, to 29 percent in 2004, to 35 percent in 2008 to 48 percent on 2012.

We obviously have a dramatic trend here.

Now, why would that be?

There are two reasons: No experience of evil and American education.

The first generation of Cuban-Americans had escaped Communist evil. People who know evil are generally conservative. Leftism and liberalism — no longer distinguishable — are rooted in large measure in naivete and wishful thinking. The beliefs that people are basically good, and that evil regimes can almost always be negotiated with are two such examples.

Also, when you escape a Communist regime, you treasure liberty and you understand that as government and state expand, liberty must contract.

That is why Jews from the Soviet Union are the only non-Orthodox Jews who vote in the majority for Republicans. They, too, know evil, and they recognize the destructive appeal of a big, take-care-of-you, state.

The other reason for the dramatic shift in the Cuban-American vote is American education.

Most American elementary schools and high schools, and nearly all colleges and universities, teach everything that is significant from a liberal/left perspective. Multiculturalism has replaced E Pluribus Unum; the American past is villainous; the country is racist; morality is relative; and the left-wing cause of the day — now global warming — is taught as incontrovertible truth (ask your children if they have been shown Al Gore’s global warming video, “An Inconvenient Truth,” or if they have been taught both sides of the man-made-global-warming-leading-to-catastrophe hypothesis).

American schools, especially universities, are left-wing seminaries. The only difference between your local college and a Christian seminary is that the latter are more honest. The Christian seminary announces its goal — to graduate committed Christians. The universities deceive when they say they have no agenda other than to open minds. They may believe this deception but it is one nevertheless. Almost no university ever has a conservative speaker at its commencement exercises; nearly every professor in liberal arts departments is a Democrat (and a left-wing Democrat at that), and on the few occasions that conservatives do receive an invitation to speak at a college, they are likely to be continuously heckled, may well need body guards, or their invitation is rescinded, as Fordham University did to Ann Coulter last week.

Members of the second Cuban-American generation have been far more influenced by their schools and by television shows than by their parents. And the same holds true for second and third and fourth and fifth generation Americans of every background.

A long time ago schools taught American history, not Politically Correct American history, as mandated, for example, by California law — which forbids the use of any textbooks that do not emphasize the roles of women, blacks, Hispanics, gays, lesbians, bisexuals and the transgendered.

And a long time ago most Americans knew what America stood for and taught it to the next generation. In other words, even conservatives have largely forgotten either the distinctive American values system or how to communicate it. Meanwhile, the left has been utterly clear about what leftism stands for and has used schools, the news media and the entertainment media to transmit its values.

As a result, the American trinity of Liberty, In God We Trust, and E Pluribus Unum have been supplanted with egalitarianism, secularism, and multiculturalism — Europe’s trinity.

And that is why the children of Cuban-Americans, like the children of virtually every other group in America, including white Anglo-Saxon Protestant children, increasingly vote left.

Either conservatives — from presidential candidates to the rest of us — learn what we stand for and communicate it, or the greatest experiment in making a good society will come to its end.

Dennis Prager’s latest book, “Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph,” was published April 24 by HarperCollins. He is a nationally syndicated radio show host and creator of PragerUniversity.Com.